Sy Hersh has a long piece in the London Review of Books
detailing the strong evidence indicating that the Turkish government
worked with Syrian rebels in a "false flag" operation of the worst sort:
staging a chemical weapons attack near Damascus in August 2013. The
intent was to throw blame for the attack on the Assad regime, thereby
drawing the United States directly into the conflict; the use of
chemical weapons against the rebels was a "red line" repeatedly laid
down by Barack Obama as the trigger for an American intervention.

As
we know, the gambit very nearly worked. In addition to the deep
background behind the sarin attack, Hersh's story also reveals the
extent of the military operation planned by Obama. Although at the time,
administration officials were speaking of "surgical strikes" and a
limited response, the White House was in fact planning a massive attack
involving the armed forces of three Western powers (the U.S., Britain
and France) that would devastate the entire country and topple the
regime. As Hersh writes:

In the aftermath of the 21 August attack
Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the
process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House
rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being
insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets
included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian
infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved
into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to
airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with
Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting
longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon
planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile
sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two
B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the
mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover
downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new
target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities
Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets
included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic
and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all
known military and intelligence buildings.

Britain and France
were both to play a part. On 29 August, the day Parliament voted against
Cameron’s bid to join the intervention, the Guardian reported that he
had already ordered six RAF Typhoon fighter jets to be deployed to
Cyprus, and had volunteered a submarine capable of launching Tomahawk
missiles. The French air force – a crucial player in the 2011 strikes on
Libya – was deeply committed, according to an account in Le Nouvel
Observateur; François Hollande had ordered several Rafale
fighter-bombers to join the American assault. Their targets were
reported to be in western Syria.

Yet even while the war plans kept racheting up to new levels of
violence -- including the targeting of civilian infrastructure, a
blatant war crime which the United States now routinely commits, even
celebrates, in all of its major military operations -- the
"intelligence" behind the loudly trumpeted charges of the Assad regime's
guilt in the attack was rapidly unraveling. Hersh details this process
at length, and I won't repeat it here. But no super-duper
gazillion-dollar "intelligence" operation was
needed to question the propaganda being catapulted about the attack at
the time. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the situation knew
that it made no sense for Assad to launch a small, strategically and
tactically ineffective chemical weapons attack when he knew this was the
one thing that would bring the full weight of the American military
machine down on his head. Especially as his forces had clearly gained
the upper hand in the civil war at that time. Indeed, his position of
strength was the very thing that led the plotters to instigate a false
flag attack; the only way to turn the losing tide, they reasoned, was to
force an American military response.

In the end, at the last
moment, when all signs were pointing to war with Syria, Obama called off
the attack. It is not clear why, but several factors doubtless played a
part. As Hersh describes, there was strong resistance to the attack
from some segments of the military itself, which knew the ostensible casus belli was
almost certainly false and feared the much larger, longer, debilitating
conflagration that was certain to follow a massive American attack.
More publicly, there was the remarkable vote in the UK parliament
against military action against Syria -- even as the ever-slavish
British government was already sending its planes to join their American
masters in the attack. This was undoubtedly significant, but one
wonders now if it was the actual tipping point against war that it
seemed at the time. After all, the Americans didn't need their little
dogsbody's handful of planes nor its ever-diminishing diplomatic muscle
to go through with the strike. (And in any case they retained the far
more substantial support of France.) If Washington had wanted to act
unilaterally, it would have done so. (And had a wider war ensued,
Britain would certainly have entered on the American side.) There was
also considerable domestic unease at the idea of war with Syria, which
was also important. Although, again, once "our boys" were "in the
field," fighting for freedom against the new Hitler, no doubt there
would have been a good deal of rallying around the flag.

But in
the end, we can't say for sure what caused the reversal. There may have
been other factors we have no inkling of. And that's another valuable
aspect of the Hersh story: it shows, once again, how the world is really
run -- in almost total secrecy, behind thin facades of hype, hypocrisy
and auto-hypnosis that have little or no connection to the reality of
power's operations. Almost nothing we are told is true; yet billions of
words are poured out every year in earnest disquisitions on the meaning
and import of the dumb shows and distractions our betters put on for us
while they pick our pockets and set our world on fire.

There is
much more in the Hersh piece, including more details on how the
administration of the Peace Prize laureate has assiduously pushed
policies that it knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, would result in
deadly weapons getting into the hands of some of the most virulent
religious extremists on earth. It's odd, isn't it? In order to overthrow
a repressive regime in Syria, the Peace Laureate allies himself in
clandestine gun-running and the fomenting of sectarian violence with a
regime, the Saudis, whose repression makes Assad's Syria look like
Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties. And while telling us that al Qaeda is
such a deadly foe to all human values that our fight against it requires
us to give up our own freedoms, violate our constitution, institute
death squads, set up all-pervasive surveillance, and wage overt and
covert wars all over the earth -- the same Laureate is ensuring that
groups openly allied with al Qaeda are being crammed full of weapons so they can spread sectarian violence across the Middle East and Africa.

Here,
as everywhere in the Berserker Imperium, the dichotomy between rhetoric
and reality is immeasurably vast, and widening all the time.

***
Also worth reading, as always, is the latest Anti-Empire Report from Bill Blum.
He takes up the astonishing lies and historical misrepresentations
Obama made in his recent European trip to re-ignite the Cold War. It was
a jaw-dropping performance, as the Peace Laureate heartily defended the
Hitlerian war of aggression against Iraq, and the war crimes in Serbia
of his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton. It was Clinton, you
remember, who, before launching that splendid little war, rejected a
Serbian peace offer that would have given him everything he demanded to
"protect" Kosovo -- save for a free pass for a complete military
occupation of Serbia. Clinton then proceeded to pulverize Serbia's
civilian infrastructure in a vicious bombing campaign that ended with an
agreement which... gave Clinton everything he asked for except, er, a
free pass for a complete military occupation of Serbia. In other words,
Clinton took the original offer -- but only after killing hundreds of
innocent people, just to show everybody's who's boss.

Here again
we see the reality of the "progressive," "liberal," "centrist,"
"moderate" (or whatever) side of the American imperium: behind their
noble words, their evocations of the "common good," of justice, freedom,
and human rights, there is the same murderous, pointless quest for
dominance.